Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Will Jefferson Survive The Modern (Progressive) Democratic Party?

Members of Connecticut’s Democrat State Central Committee on
July 22 voted unanimously to pull the eject lever on Thomas Jefferson, 3rd
President of the United States, and Andrew Jackson, 7th President of the United
States, widely considered the father of the modern Democratic Party. On a
unanimous voice vote, the names of the two gentlemen were stripped from the
Party’s annual “Jefferson, Jackson, Bailey Dinner.” The Confederate Flag
lowered permanently from a flagpole on the lawn of the State Capitol in South
Carolina following the racist-terrorist murder of nine churchgoers at the
historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church has brought down more
than a flag.

On the 67th year of the annual Jefferson,
Jackson, Bailey fete, Connecticut Democrats awakened suddenly to the
slaver pasts of both Jefferson and Jackson.U.S.
Congresswoman Rosa
DeLauro stoutly resisted the effort to airbrush Mr. Jefferson from
Democratic Party history. The third American president was, Mrs. DeLauro noted,
one of the founders of the Republic, but she seemed willing enough to efface
Mr. Jackson, an Indian killer and slaver whose violent character is far less
defensible.

Perhaps Democrats in Connecticut spearheading the change
should be asked if they would rather see Mr. Jackson replaced on the twenty
dollar bill than Alexander Hamilton on the ten dollar bill. The change is being
made to make room for a yet unannounced woman of moment. Mr. Hamilton certainly
was no friend of slavery and did much to shape the American economy. Mr. Jackson
resisted the establishment of the Second Bank of the United States, moved
Indians onto reservations, robbed black farmers of their land in Florida and
was as President at least as intemperate with his political foes as the current
Democratic President or, coming closer to home, our prickly Governor Dannel
Malloy, all of whose budgets were formed without Republican Party input.
Bi-partisan government in Connecticut was thrown to the winds when Mr. Malloy,
the first Democratic governor in the state since 1991, assumed office.

The politically opportune airbrushing of history presents
awkward practical problems. George Washington, considered the father of the
country, was also a slaver, though Washington did manumit his slaves to freedom
in his will. Washington D.C., where Mrs. DeLauro commingles with other
Democrats at the policy salons she holds at her
plush Capitol Hill townhouse, is named after the nation’s first
President. Should the nation’s capital be renamed? And what is to done with the
Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial?

A hint that the author of the Declaration of Independence
was to be degraded was provided by Governor Dannel Malloy at the last
Jefferson, Jackson, Bailey Dinner. Mr. Malloy said the change would not trouble
him and later offered a few suggestions that would attach the Democratic Party
to its more modern evocations.

The problems of the past will continue to haunt the Democratic
Party for years to come. Slavery, Jim Crow and its modern equivalents must
continue to be denounced, and there is little question that Republicans --
called by Democrats in the South during slave days “black Republicans”-- have less need than the Democratic Party to shed the past. “Shed” is exactly
the right word: As people and institutions move from the past to the future,
they slough off their past sins, like snakes shedding their skins. The oak tree
is not the acorn. And the problems that face blacks today in America are both
similar and different than those that confronted Frederick Douglass, who was
asked by Abraham Lincoln following his Second Inaugural Address what he thought
of the speech now engraved on the north chamber wall of the Lincoln monument.
John Wilkes Booth, in the audience, heard Lincoln say:

“The Almighty has His own
purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that
offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’ If we shall
suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence
of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed
time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this
terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern
therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a
living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that
this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it
continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty
years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn
with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three
thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord
are true and righteous altogether."

Lincoln's remarks run like lava through Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech, delivered nearly a hundred years later from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. This was the same Lincoln who praised Jefferson on the
occasion of his birthday celebration in Boston for having inserted into the
Declaration of Independence language – “All men are created equal” -- that in
time struck the irons from the feet of slaves:

“This is a world of compensations;
and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no
slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and,
under a just God, cannot long retain it.

“All honor to Jefferson--to the man
who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a
single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a
merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all
times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall
be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing
tyranny and oppression.”